Today, many industries employ Linear Tape Open (“LTO”) storage technology. This technology is suited to house backups/archives of various types of data due to its high storage to physical size ratio, its lack of volatility, and its ability to maintain the integrity of the stored data without a constant supply of power. Motion picture and television industries commonly use LTO to capture and store high-definition video. Such industries commonly employ LTO storage device management robots (“robots”) that are capable of quickly loading and mounting the desire LTO storage device. If there is already an LTO storage device in the robot's desired read-slot, then the robot must unmount and remove the LTO storage device.
However, as the name suggests, LTO storage media are linear, in that the data stored thereon is stored sequentially, bit-by-bit, on a large strip of magnetic tape. Thus, in order to access data on an LTO storage device, the device must be in a robot's “import/export tray,” an area that allows the LTO storage device to be physically read by a “read-head,” which exists inside the robot an is capable of scanning data stored on the magnetic tape. As a consequence, this tape must be fast-forwarded or rewound to a particular location on the tape in order to load a particular file. Further, in order to access one file on a particular LTO storage device, the entire contents of the device must be written to a traditional spinning hard drive.
With each generation of LTO storage devices having increased storage capacity, the feasibility of writing the entire contents of an LTO storage device has decreased proportionally. One method of alleviating this problem is to incorporate “file markers” into the LTO storage device. Such file markers placed physical barriers comprising bits of “null code” on the magnetic tape that are identifiable by an appropriately configured computer, thereby separating user-defined directories. Such file markers allow an LTO storage device to be directly “fast forwarded” to a specific directory.
Unfortunately, file markers fail to fully serve the needs of the industry. User-defined directories often contain hundreds of files, each containing a multitude of frames any of which may be desired by an editor. These directories, despite being a fraction of the size of the entire LTO storage device, are often still too large to be used conveniently, and inserting increasingly numerous file markers wastes space on an LTO storage device. In addition, increasing the number of file markers on a storage device increasingly slows the process of reading data from an LTO storage device.